Reduce beacon range or effectiveness

[vanatteveldt]

Beacons have a range of two tiles from their own edge. Since the cost of modules is orders of magnitude above any other infrastructure cost, a common challenge is to optimize production per module, or equivalently to make sure each beacon affects as many plants as possible and each plant is affected by as many beacons as possible.

In almost all cases, the optimal solution is to have rows of beacons interleaved with rows of production plants. This allows every beacon to affect 8 plants, and every plant is affected by 8 beacons. This leaves 2 tiles on either side of the plant, and the challenge in developing late-game setups is fitting the needed logistics into those 2 tiles, which often (but not always) means bots are a natural choice.

I think any problem with a rubber stamp solution risks being boring, just like how 2xn nuclear plants are the only way to get max neighbourhood bonus.

Suggestion: Make beacons only affect adjacent plants (i.e. one range around their edge), or alternatively have less (e.g. 50%) effect on plants that are not directy adjacent. A backwards compatible suggestion would be to create a "beacon mk2" that functions like a normal beacon at range 2, but has double (i.e. not halved) effect on adjacent plants.

This would open up the design game more by making it attractive to place plants directly to beacons and either using the other edge of the plant for logistics, or spacing out plants more and using the space in between for logistics.

[Engimage]

Beacons are already high tech so there is no point in making mk2 - they are already end game.
I do not see the point of nerfing them as their use case is optimizing high end builds for UPS. Making them less efficient will make things worse.

Despite of my scepsis on the matter I can throw an idea - make their effectiveness proportional to the number of TILES they cover on a given machine.

[vanatteveldt]

Beacons are already high tech so there is no point in making mk2 - they are already end game.
I do not see the point of nerfing them as their use case is optimizing high end builds for UPS. Making them less efficient will make things worse.

Despite of my scepsis on the matter I can throw an idea - make their effectiveness proportional to the number of TILES they cover on a given machine.

That would also be cool. What I meant wasn't to either nerf them or make them more powerful (although I can see my title would suggest that :-$), I mostly meant to change it so boost depends on range - which your suggestion would also more or less do since an adjacent plan would always have more tiles covered. The goal would be to make beacon designs less mindless.